Reflections on the Colony, Ancient and Modern

Phiroze Vasunia University College London
Discussion : Irad Malkin Tel Aviv University
À l’invitation de Maguelone Bastide École française d’Athènes

What is a colony? How has our understanding of the term changed over time? The paper looks, briefly, at Moses Finley’s argument that Greek colonies were not colonies in the early modern sense of the word. We shall see how early modern writers referred to Greek settlements as colonies and suggest that something vital is lost by not thinking of these settlements as colonies. It will be instructive, from this perspective, to look briefly, at Greek settlements (e.g. in Thasos) which are conventionally referred to as colonies, and see how views of colonization have changed, partly to reflect current concerns in postcolonial studies. We shall also attempt to put Greek colonization in dialogue with early modern uses of the term colony in modern European languages (mainly in English) and see how these modern conceptions of the colony are worked out in a dialogue with ancient Greek and Roman histories.